Season-opening win vs. Hofstra right remedy for Princeton

Princeton’s comeback tour got off to a good start last Saturday as the Tigers defeated Hofstra, 12-6. It was a resounding beginning for a program that had lost five players to season-ending injuries and had 15 players deal with various aches and pains en route to a 4-8 overall record and a 2-4 Ivy League mark last season.

“There’s a lot of pride in this program, and I think we all recognized that as we were going through a very unique set of circumstances last year,” coach Chris Bates said Tuesday morning. “It was just a bad combination of injuries and playing a lot of young guys who just had not logged minutes at a high level. Division I lacrosse is competitive week in and week out. So I think there’s a sense of confidence, a sense of hunger to right the ship. Coming into the first game, you never know. Our two scrimmages were sort of pedestrian, nothing too exciting. We weren’t overly excited with our play, but then we came out and executed and did a good job against Hofstra. It was a nice way to start. Saying we’re on a mission might be an overstatement, but the guys have sharpened their pencils and tried to figure out what we need to make the big step. They’ve worked hard, so it was nice to have that effort validated on Saturday.”

With Princeton suffering its worst campaign in the Ivy League since 1989, conference opponents like Penn, Harvard and Yale vaulted past the Tigers to grab headlines and preseason attention.

Bates chuckled when asked about the lack of attention this year.

“We’ll stay as the snake in the grass,” he said. “We’re fine. We have confidence in who we are and where we’re going. You guys can talk about whoever you want to talk about. At the end of the day, our goal is go out and beat them. We know we’ve got to prove it. When you come off a year like we did, the proof is in the results. So we’ve earned to some degree the fact that we think we’re a little undervalued. But it’s a day-to-day thing, and we’ve got to demonstrate that we belong at the top of the heap.”